Five years af­ter Al­la­habad Bank ‘mis­placed’ the prop­erty doc­u­ments of a Meerut-based res­i­dent, who had taken two loans on the ba­sis of his prop­erty (the papers of which were kept as eq­ui­table mort­gage), Meerut con­sumer court asked the bank to pay Rs 5.10 lakh as penalty to the cus­tomer. At the same time, the court also ruled that if the bank found one of the three prop­erty doc­u­ments sub­mit­ted, then Rs 1.5 lakh could be de­ducted from the penalty amount.

Mu­rari Lal had filed a case in the con­sumer court in Jan­uary 2013 af­ter he found that Al­la­habad Bank au­thor­i­ties were ‘in­ca­pable’ of re­turn­ing the three prop­erty doc­u­ments that were sub­mit­ted as eq­ui­table mort­gage against two loans that he had ap­plied for ear­lier. “Once I was done with re­turn­ing the loans in 2010 and 2012 re­spec­tively, I asked for my doc­u­ments from the bank – which they did not return and started giv­ing ex­cuses. Mean­while, I wrote a let­ter to them but did not get any an­swer in return,” said Mu­rari Lal in his com­plaint to the con­sumer court.

The bench headed by Desh Bhushan Jain, pres­i­dent, con­sumer fo­rum, and Indu Chaud­hary, mem­ber, con­sumer fo­rum, gave a de­ci­sion in favour of Mu­rari Lal and in­structed Al­la­habad Bank au­thor­i­ties to pay Rs 5.10 lakh in a month’s pe­riod, which if not paid in the afore­said pe­riod would in­vite a nine per cent yearly in­ter­est.